{"id":364574,"date":"2018-06-08T15:09:44","date_gmt":"2018-06-08T14:09:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/dazzled-by-tech-universities-googlification-and-microsoft\/"},"modified":"2018-06-08T15:09:44","modified_gmt":"2018-06-08T14:09:44","slug":"dazzled-by-tech-universities-googlification-and-microsoft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/dazzled-by-tech-universities-googlification-and-microsoft\/","title":{"rendered":"Dazzled by Tech: Universities, Googlification and Microsoft"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>The mechanical, robotic striving of university politburos and their jack boot managers have always been interesting when it comes to one particular topic: the role of technology and its adoption.\u00a0 For it is in technology that the mediocre paper clip shuffler can claim to have achieved something \u2013 on someone else\u2019s back, naturally.<\/p>\n<p>The shift to Google by universities as a storage and communication mechanism was something taken with a breezy obliviousness to its implications.\u00a0 For Google, it was a magical boon: mass concentration of staff and student data, cloud facilities, the magic of information.\u00a0 Such decisions are generally taken without asking the staff who actually use it \u2013 the nature of university management is piously anti-democratic, with all the usual balloons of sentiment about faux consultation and the like.<\/p>\n<p>Google\u2019s move into the university sector with a mixture of predatory zeal and seductive wooing was inexorable, mimicking the cyber colonisation drive of Steve Jobs at Apple (\u201ccomputers are bicycles for the mind\u201d).<\/p>\n<p>In schools, Google has built a relentless, unquestioned empire, taking root in such systems as Chicago Public Schools, the third largest school district in the United States.\u00a0 As the <em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/05\/13\/technology\/google-education-chromebooks-schools.html\">New York Times<\/a><\/em> noted in May 2017, such an event heralded \u201cthe Googlification of the classroom.\u201d\u00a0 Teachers became Google grunts advertising products to other schools, bypassing school district officials.\u00a0 Students became Google converts,&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/2018\/06\/dazzled-by-tech-universities-googlification-and-microsoft\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The mechanical, robotic striving of university politburos and their jack boot managers have always been interesting when it comes to one particular topic: the role of technology and its adoption.\u00a0 For it is in technology that the mediocre paper clip shuffler can claim to have achieved something \u2013 on someone else\u2019s back, naturally. The shift [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2525,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-364574","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2525"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364574\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}